MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe
By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist | October 2, 2005
BOSTON AREA Catholics are starting to wake up from a pleasant if naive dream that a humble monk will lead them out of the dark years of the clergy sexual abuse scandal to the promised land.
Under Archbishop Sean O'Malley, everything is different and everything is exactly the same. In some quarters, the disappointment is so keen, it raises questions: Who, really, is in charge? Is Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the man who aided and covered up the scandal, still calling the shots from Rome?
Two years ago, O'Malley was embraced as the new leader of the Boston archdiocese. The friar known for his brown robe, sandals, and prayerful humility would supposedly end the arrogant -- and tragic for its victims -- reign of his predecessor. ''The leadership promised hasn't been delivered . . . He is not running the show," Jack Connors Jr., a prominent member of Boston's Irish Catholic establishment, now says of O'Malley.
The mess, fiscal and psychological, that Law left behind did not make it easy for his successor. Local Catholics rebelled at every turn against parish and school closings he insisted were necessary in the aftermath of the scandal. The ouster of the Rev. Walter Cuenin as pastor of Our Lady, Help of Christians parish in Newton, is the latest controversy to rock the archdiocese and increase the bitterness toward O'Malley.
Cuenin's use of a parish-funded, parish-approved lease car was supposedly the basis for what was billed as O'Malley's decision to yank him for ''financial improprieties." Speculation as to the real motivation includes Cuenin's support for gays and his past criticism of Law. He was one of 58 priests in the Boston area who urged Law to resign. Cuenin's replacement is the Rev. Christopher Coyne, Law's chief spokesman during the abuse scandal.
Rome always rules. So it was always wishful thinking to believe O'Malley was an independent church executive who could do what Boston's liberal Catholic elite want. Like every Roman Catholic leader, he answers to Rome.
Under the new pope, the ideological right controls the church. One major fault line with the left involves homosexuality. The tremors from gay-related issues can be felt from Rome to Massachusetts. Pope Benedict XVI is considering a new Vatican policy indicating that gay men should not be ordained as Catholic priests. The local bishop of Worcester pulled a priest from the altar after he printed an item in the parish bulletin that challenged a proposed ban on gay marriage. Cuenin, the deposed pastor, publicly questioned the church's teaching on homosexuality and its ban on the ordination of women priests.